Press release

Groningen, 19 July 2024 - Energy infrastructure company Gasunie recorded € 171 million less in net profit and € 407 million less in revenue in the first half of 2024 compared to the first half of 2023. Most of the decline can be attributed to the regulatory system Gasunie is facing in the Netherlands and Germany. In 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gasunie’s network operators sold much more capacity than expected at sometimes much higher prices. As a result, actual revenue that year was substantially higher than the revenue cap set by the regulators. This additional revenue is being returned to the market in the form of lower tariffs in 2024 and subsequent years. Additionally, Gasunie sold and auctioned less capacity in recent months than in the same period last year. The impact of the fall in net profit was tempered by the lower energy costs for gas transmission.

Gasunie CEO Willemien Terpstra says, ‘In the first half of 2024, Gasunie continued steadily building on its energy transition projects. There were milestones to celebrate at Porthos, and the integration plan for the extension of the WarmtelinQ waste heat pipeline to Leiden was adopted. These are all significant steps on the way to realising a climate-neutral society in 2050. At the same time, in recent months it became abundantly clear just how important the role of natural gas and natural gas infrastructure is in the current energy system. Norway has taken over Russia’s position as the main source country of natural gas imports. Markets react nervously to even minor disruptions in the supply of Norwegian gas. This year we expanded our transmission system in Germany, with the effect that the country can now import LNG on its own for the first time and distribute it without problem to domestic customers. And in the Netherlands, June saw us welcome the 100th tanker delivering LNG at the port of Eemshaven.’

Gasunie CFO Janneke Hermes adds, ‘Gasunie wants the energy transition to proceed as smoothly as possible. It is important to take the broad energy system into consideration, especially now that electrification is facing delays or hitches in many places. For example, half of all Dutch households could be made more sustainable if the Netherlands were to use the 2 bcm of biomethane it envisions producing in 2030 in hybrid heat pumps. And the use of carbon-neutral hydrogen can balance the energy system and this way accelerate the energy transition. We will continue to need natural gas in the coming decades, to supplement green energy and to serve as a fallback. Until the volumes of hydrogen and biomethane have grown sufficiently, we will need natural gas to power hard-to-electrify industrial processes and generate electricity. At the same time, we want to offer the users of our infrastructure good alternatives as quickly as possible, which is why we have budgeted almost € 8 billion in investments in transmission and storage of hydrogen, CO₂, heat and biomethane by 2030.’